Tag: Toyota

Continuous Improvement

Before Telecommuting and Online Retailing,  we got Management by Walking Around .

Then the gurus told us to “re-engineer” the corporation (Japanese influence).

Then, Toyota was on the roll with Continuous Improvement (Al Gore was buying into this when trying to re-invent the US Government). True to its form, Toyota continuously improves its R&D, from EV racing to 3-wheel concept EV. The Prius has established itself as the category leader.

If you don’t re-invent, someone else will (the Innovator’s Dilemma).

In fact, Steve Jobs did a great job at breaking the vicious cycle with 99 cents per song proposition, knowing that disruption would be followed by destruction (of the music industry).

Once again, we learn that corporations are sitting on their war chests full of cash.

They are looking to buy small and promising competitors, often times, to eliminate “disruption” in one fell swoop.

The big guys’ version of Continuous Improvement is Continuous Consumption, pac-man style.

From a Marketing standpoint, Hyundai and Kia have done a great job gaining traction and acceptance.

This is when GM, VW and other car makers all try to make a comeback in the face of pent-up demand (Recession hesitation).

Not only technology leapfrogs, consumers also buy in to the latest and greatest e.g. Galaxy IV.

More gadgets, more interconnection and integration.

From home to car to the office (even at those third places like Starbucks).

There will be a generation of consumers who take broadband for granted (reminds me of those pin ball machines, a 70’s must-have for off-campus hangouts).

Putting it all together. Companies need to continuously improve their products, services and ways to reach their target markets.

Buyers look for a positive experience, both on and off-line. Here is where the classic text, Influence, counts: social proof, consistency and scarcity.

When the Tesla is in back order, it’s a good sign (scarcity). So is the Prius (consistency). Before we know it, those with the guts to go for the Gold win e.g. full plug-in after trying hybrid cars(EV still needs critical mass -or Social Proof to be validated). With those war chests, I am sure companies can now afford to leap-frog their R&D knowing in their guts that there is a price for everything, including in-action. Even if you do nothing, just sitting on the track, you will likely be run over by a train. Kaizen.

An American Invention

Dr Lloyd Tran never stops and hardly sleeps. For a right reason. He is an inventor at heart.

He started out as a chemist. Then worked for huge corporations such as Monsanto. Then he invented and manufactured his own drug release device in Irvine, CA (right at the time companies started to look elsewhere to outsource and offshore). After a stint in nanotech, he found his niche in CleanTech e.g. solar panel, EV battery etc… His most recent invention: electric car conversion.

His students built on top of what they had learned from AC/DC (I thought that was a band).

So far, they have de-gutted a few Porches , VW, and even Jaguar as gliders to install EV components (power train, A/C and even cruise control). I test drove the green Porche and found it quiet, fast and futuristic.

I don’t see how others can’t do it. Just find a problem, ask why not and solve it.

Tesla is getting first-prize for this year Electric Vehicles (the S series).

Toyota, embattled with lawsuit and litigation, is a bit cautious and conservative. But even then, Toyota won first-prise in EV race cars. It has released its first three-wheel EV concept car also.

What’s the waiting? EMR (Electronic Medical Record) and EV. Or we just wait to admit everyone into ER?

We don’t lack the know-how. We lack the will to change. To rock the boat. All the while, we are told to think “out of the box”. Maybe the “box” or the boat, needs to get out of itself.

One way is to travel. To see how other species go about their days (water jars on their heads in the desert, automobile glider on buffalo cart in Vietnam etc…). I wish I could show you a picture of the latter which I saw on One Vietnam Network.

The point is, we take the path of least resistance by default.

Changes are mentioned only in passing. But men like Dr Lloyd saw an old Jaguar, hauled it back and made something amazing out of it (Jaguar ironically is now own by Tata, former colonized now owns empire’s jewel, after a change of hand at Ford).

If I were to be Tata owner, I would contact Dr Lloyd Tran, and ask to see the all-electrified Jag.

What used to be a symbol of luxury is now also hip and cool (environmentally friendly). I took that  smog-filled Jag to state inspection. Now, I heard that it is smog-free (zero emission).

Can’t wait to get back and give it a test-drive. It might blow me away (fast and furiously quiet).

For now, I put this out as a challenge: be world citizen. Solve problems where ever you may see them. Think first as a technologist, then a marketer (and last as a politician).

Before you know , you might even get elected. I know how hard and challenging the task was to transform an ICE Jaguar into an EV one. But the team did just that. All I have is “three cheers” to an American Invention. It is right here in our back yard (behind the city’s dump). One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, that which once was smog-filled now turns smog-free.

Faith in humanity

A graduate of Penn State, I related well to the scenes from the Deer Hunter, set in an industrial town of Pennsylvanian.

Smokestacks on the slope, familiar faces and friends and the “Welcome Home” sign for returning soldiers from a distant war.

But unlike other wars before and since, this one was controversial.  It showed when the main character, portrayed by DeNiro, ducked behind a taxi driver and asked to be driven pass his own Welcoming party.

Out of three “deer hunters”, one came back without injury to the mind or the body. Am I thy brothers’ keeper?

In CBS  Vietnam‘s documentaries, soldiers were shown sitting in the shade, smoking and listening to transistor radio which was playing “Oh, I don’t want to die”  (Reflections of my life).

Yet decades later, land mines still exploded claiming many more limps and lives.

The late Princess Diana was advocating the elimination of land mines.

At long last, the largest nuclear bomb in TX is being disassembled (the article said engineers have since died off, so it’s hard to locate the blue prints).

Farewell to arms.

Hemingway, go home.

All we need is love.

Faith in humanity. Speaking of humanity. We saw quake in Turkey and flood in Thailand.

The heavy rain and flood forced Thailand to close its airport and evacuate parts of its capital (the toll: 506 deaths).

When it rains it pours there in South East Asia.

I was in Vietnam last year. All of a sudden, it poured really hard.

From a sidewalk cafe, I saw a middle-age lady in cone hat tried to push a scrap metal cart whose wheels were half buried in water-covered pot holes.

Now, the UN is advocating Environmental sustainability, with 7 Billion people sharing Earth’s limited resources, foremost is clean water.

China was quick to beef up R&D in solar and desalinated water.

We can not pretend we live in complete isolation. Debris from Fukushima quake drifted to California.

Flood in Thailand slow down server production, which pushes companies to the Cloud.

First wave: Main Frame, second wave: personal computer and third wave: cloud, which brings us in full circle.

Talking about automation, and unemployment. Stats shows high unemployment among returning veterans of the two wars. It’s time for that Welcome-Home sign again.

Hope they find a job and not wait too long for to receive those benefits.

Hope they won’t  have to duck behind the taxi driver.

Farewell to arms, to guilt and to self-recrimination.

All we need is love and a little faith in humanity. Princess Diana would have been proud to see a female film Director received an Oscar for Hurt Locker. The subject: land mine.

Easily swayed

According to social scientists, any two people are only separated by 6 to 7 degrees of connection. Last week I put it to test.

Surely enough, the quake victims in Japan somehow are separated from me by only three degrees. My niece’s friend had relatives who fled Japan and came to stay with them. Two short introductions and a short ride stand between us.

We are living on a planet of 7 billion people, 2 of which are online.

The cumulative brain powers are enormous. For the first time, it seems as if a lot of things are now made possible, from wikipedia to wikileaks.

Thirty years ago, I gave up my summer in between school years to do relief work. The only resources at my disposal was an address book of friends from college and a roll of stamps. I copied fund-raising letters, sent out to my “network” and waited for donation. Quite a risky adventure, both on the funding side and visa turn-around time. But we pulled it off. The summer turned out to be a highlight of my life.

If we had the online resources as currently available, we would probably have uploaded a Youtube clip of boat people cramped and confined in Hong Kong prison facilities, women who were raped and turned cannibalistic to survive….

You know the drill. My contention is, we are now resource-rich, but are we becoming more compassionate ? In other words, does the good-will increase proportionately with the tools to express it? Or precisely because of information-overload that led to compassion fatigue?

To sell something people need and want is easy. Costs vs benefits results in change (buy).

To sell an idea that people can become their better selves requires enchantment.

People died in mass protests (herd instinct) or annual Run-of-the-Bulls (even cheese rolling downhills). But to spare a change for the guy holding the homeless sign takes a lot more. He will need to sing and dance. He will have to put on an act of desperation before the lights turn green.

We act differently in public vs in private.

When survival instinct kicks in, self-preservation is above all else.

Multiply that 7 billion times. Then we get the picture of state of the world.

How does the quake in Japan affect our lives: a lot. Someone relates to someone who knows my relatives is suffering. He/she is doubling up in a house near ours.

Then the Toyota dealers in town won’t get foreign parts etc… Go Hyundai, this is your chance in this no-hire-no-fire economy. Sometimes people change because they are forced to, not because they would like to. But change is as sure as the sun that rises tomorrow. You don’t see it because you are not 30,000 feet above ground. Those who are at the executive level know to expect change, prepare contingencies for it, and profit from it. Same crisis, but it is danger to some and opportunity to others. We will learn to make use of the Web from sharing cute kitten clips to vendor’s immolation clip. Welcome to the age of participation/consumption. It’s never been more exciting and dynamic than time present, when both push and pull technologies are vying for our attention, swinging and swaying our votes and demanding our devotion. Hold on to your wallet while keeping an open mind, to quote Buffett.

seeing what’s been there

Adjust your lens or change it, then you will see all kinds of things.

Even the same things, but much clearer.

The power of reframing.

Organization or organism all need to self-examine at one time or another.

For instance, after taking your shirts back from the cleaners, you might notice that even though they are clean, but they no longer have the feel of new fabrics. There lies the difference between new and clean.

Take that up one more notch. Market that might be on the uptick today, will turn mature tomorrow (hence the need for product extension or reinvention).

Toyota took a page from Hyundai which has offered product warranty, to also give two-year free maintenance (on selected models).

We all need to work harder for the money.

It makes sense for Toyota to have customers come back to the dealership voluntarily instead of via forced recall.

We will either look at the same thing in new ways, or try to find new things.

There are things about ourselves we don’t even know. Doctors can always find out these things via all kinds of test (MRI scan).

Then at the culture level, we often learn more about our culture through the eyes of  foreign journalists and tourists (a journalist observes that daily traffic in Vietnam looks like people performing circus acts every day).

One example of this is Hanoi.

Many journalists camped out to give us modern pictures of the city.  Foreigners like Old town Hanoi.  The same way I enjoyed Old Town Alexandria near Mt Vernon.

So, in Hanoi they celebrate, while in DC, people are puzzled about Vietnam Memorial structural integrity (which had a crack).

During this recession, many of us are forced to reframe, and reposition our career.

Not all can self-reinvent to get into health care, education or environment.

Meanwhile, IT companies like Dell decided to invest billion of dollars overseas where future demands are.

Welcome to a  global world where India and China consumers dictate  brand extension.

In the US the only chain that seemed to grow was Dollar stores where you can buy last year’s Christmas gift wrap on the cheap. They would rather have you store their merchandise at home, then in their stores.  A new kind of inventory outsourcing, a new way of clearing the deck. Old dog, but new tricks.

 

Kaizen

In the 80’s, we saw many books about Japan e.g. Rising Sun, The Japan That Can Say NO.

Now, the Most Admired Country list seems to say NO to Japan, and places it at number 5.

Versace closed its door there after having sold to all the old people of the laggard group.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e5e6a886-b325-11de-ac13-00144feab49a.html

(in Dalat, Vietnam, a plan to build an all-Japan city for retirees was also scrapped).

Meanwhile, Toyota put out a recall for many of its late- model vehicles (its floor mat made the gas pedal stuck and killed 4 in San Diego).

And last month election results ushered in a new Prime Minister  from the opposing party.

Japan needs a quick fix.

Not from Robots, or foreigners, whose labor it needs (especially for the service sector), but whose origin it despises.

Young Japanese, generation without the Sun, got their play book from the Woodstock generation, hence no Versace

or if they needed accessories, they try SampleLab, or knock-off. When you sleep on your parent’s couch,

you don’t want to get caught trading up. Besides, high-end accessories don’t jibe with dark leather.

I admired the Samurai spirit, and how quickly Japan adopts technologies: AI, nano, just-in-time manufacturing, and

of course, the Beatles.

I also respect their stamina when faced with humiliation, from France’s De Gaulle to America’s Japan-bashing era.

I also wowed at their bouncing back , from the real estate fiasco to the Asian crisis of the last decade.

Somehow, Japan, personified by Toyota, seems to be able to pull rabbit after rabbit out of the hat (kaizen?)

Lexus, Scion, Sony (with Samsung “closer than it appears in rear view mirror”).

Its export-driven economy has been its crown jewel. Until neighboring China, India, Singapore, Korea

joined the game. All of a sudden, Japan found itself defending its home turf.

No more shopping trip to destination Vegas (whose show hosts used to greet the tour audience in Japanese in between drum rolls).

The outlet mall which served as a bus stop in between Los Angeles and Las Vegas has seen this boom and burst too well.

Now, at Number 5, Japan needs a miracle to get out from bad loans, to sustain its world tourist life style and to take care of its aging population.

At least, its defense bills have all been paid for since WWII.

Now, it needs to open up to fresh voices and visions. It did that when sending a Toyota designing team to drive up and down California Freeways. The result was the Lexus. It should now do the same, only this time, Kaizen at home.